The arresting eye
Subtitle: race and the anxiety of detection
By: Jinny Huh
Series: Cultural frames, framing culture; Cultural frames, framing culture
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9780813937021; 9780813937014
Subjects: Asian Americans; Race identity; Passing (Identity) in literature; History and criticism; African Americans; American Detective and mystery stories; Race awareness
Description: In her reading of detective fiction and passing narratives from the end of the nineteenth century forward, Jinny Huh investigates anxieties about race and detection. Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, she examines the racial formations of African Americans and Asian Americans not only in detective fiction (from Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan to the works of Pauline Hopkins) but also in narratives centered on detection itself (such as Winnifred Eaton's rhetoric of undetection in her Japanese romances). In explicating the literary depictions of race-detection anxiety, Huh demonstrates how cultural, legal, and scientific discourses across diverse racial groups were also struggling with demands for racial decipherability. Anxieties of detection and undetection, she concludes, are not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent on each other's construction and formation in American history and culture.

Includes primary source material.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-201) and index.